aggravatedFinal Cuts: New Tales Of Hollywood Horror And Other Spectacles edited by Ellen Datlow, part 2
Night Of The Living
A showing of a cult folk horror from the 1970s goes awry. This was mediocrity.
Best Lines:
“That shark movie with Jason Statham,”
“Nobody likes Mikey much.”
“Lost accents.”
“Parade of images he understands.”
“Demands complete agreement or the world will fall apart.”
The One We Tell Bad Children
By Laird Barron. An AU America is the setting for this dark rural horror. This was good.
Best Lines:
“The evil is in the waiting.”
“Visitors were rare and unwelcome.”
“While frowning ominiously.”
Snuff In Six Scenes
A man's murder plot is the nadir of cruelty, but it goes awry for him. This was okay.
Insanity Among Penguins
By Brain Hodge. People go to see a misbegotten bootleg film. The bootleg has something more than sinister aspects, much more. This was very good.
Best Lines:
“Impulse stops.”
“Picking out a movie meant inspecting an artifact on a shelf.”
“With the name of Blockbuster a joke, synonymous with extinction,”
“Their wares clogging landfills.”
“Her kind became an affront to territorial manbabies and neckbeards.”
“You lack for nothing, you spoiled brat.”
“Pasty-faced hoarders.”
“Your existence defined as something else's food.”
“Fatalistically forecasting.”
“Found footage before there was such a genre.”
“Wondered how many of our thoughts were embeds left by generations of screenwriters.”
From The Balcony Of The Idaway Arms
WTF?
Lords Of The Matinee
By Stephen Graham Jones. Told with indiffernt prose, this is the tale of an uncovered murder. This was a disastrous failure.
Best Line:
“Successfully avoided any meaningful interactions with them.”
A Ben Evans Film
By Josh Malerman. A crazy man makes a film. No.
Best Line:
“He hid in the closet.”
My Face Is A Mask
By Christopher Golden. A man seeks out a horror movie prop. This was good.
Best Line:
“Forgotten by everyone.”
Folie A Deux, Or The Ticking Hourglass
WTF?
Best Line:
“Grains of sand so ancient the desert it was collected from disappeared millennia ago,”
Hungry Girls
???
Best Line:
“We have nothing else left.”
Cut Frame
By Gemma Files. This is an excellent tale of a fraught encounter with a starlet.
Best Lines:
“Old movies are the dreams of dead people.”
“Provoke destructive obsession in others simply by existing.”
“Between all the questions she wouldn't answer and her lack of friends, it didn't suprise me how it ended.”
“Legally inaccessible.”
“Does that sound terrible? It should.”
“That city is full of cults,”
“Made some unpleasant suggestions.”